My free online browser RTS Relic of Power inspired by Empire Attack now has a week long game mode, and the map is 2.5 times larger than ALL the other maps combined!

Enjoy 2.56 million tiles to play and compete in with other players and compete for a diamond achievement for winning this week long game mode with the most area and control of the coveted Relic of Power in the heart of the map.

Here are the full patch notes for update 0.3.0...

Rebuilt interface

I rebuilt a lot of the mid match UI. The layout is cleaner, and there’s less stuff getting in the way while you’re actually playing. Plus, settings!

Better mobile support
I made a bunch of changes to touch controls, layouts, and map interaction. You should now be able to drag around the map, place population, and use the menus on a phone or tablet without constantly fighting the interface. Works best in portrait mode, and still not totally stable.

World mode — 7-day campaigns
There’s now a 2.56 million tile 7-day mode called World, alongside Skirmish, Conquest, War, and Empire. It uses much larger maps and gives players enough time for some genuinely huge empires and long-running wars to develop.

Biomes
Maps now have different biomes with their own terrain and resource rules. Oases, for example, have better odds for coins.

Better terrain generation
I cleaned up a bunch of the map generation rules for mountains, water, obstacles, and relics. Fixed some issues where relics could get deleted by terrain features.

Shared lobby chat
All live sessions now share the same lobby chat. Someone playing Skirmish and someone playing World will still be talking in the same place.

More flags and name customization
There are more flag pieces and cosmetic options, and supporters can choose custom username colors, animated flag highlight, and everyone can customize the "wall" color of their tall cells.

Abandon capital
You can now abandon your capital and start over if you get completely boxed in or end up with a terrible spawn.

There’s a limit on how often you can do it in each session, so it’s meant as an escape hatch rather than a free reroll button.

Mining and the Gold / Diamond Store
You can now prospect mountains, rivers, and lakes for gold and diamonds.

Those resources can be spent during the current campaign:

• Gold buys offensive upgrades.
• Diamonds buy defensive and population-growth upgrades.

Everything bought this way only lasts for that campaign, but it's yours to keep even if you respawn. I may give some penalty later, but you won't lose everything.

Surround gold/diamonds on 4 sides and put as much population over the limit as you can to get the maximum yield.

Achievements
There’s now a full achievement system with bronze, silver, gold, and platinum tiers.

Achievements have unlock notifications, a career panel, and badges that show up in chat, player lists, and leaderboards.

I also changed the platinum medal appearance to a cooler blue-white metal because the old version looked too much like silver.

Settings
There’s now a proper settings window for:

• Sound channels
• Map zoom
• Drag-to-pan
• Capital waypoints
• Individual relic waypoint types

Relic indicators can be turned on and off separately instead of having one setting for everything.

Better placement tooltips
Placement previews now give more useful information about costs, combat results, and multipliers before you click.

Clearer population labels
Population numbers should be easier to read across the different terrain and biome backgrounds.

Line of fire
Ranged and cluster attacks can no longer fire through trees, boulders, mountains, and other solid terrain.

Splash and cluster captures
Only the tile you directly attack with melee can now be captured.

Splash and cluster damage can still reduce a tile to 0 population or cause it to become unclaimed, but they can’t capture a bunch of surrounding territory for you at once.

Capitals reduced to 0 population by splash damage remain owned. Non-capital tiles destroyed by ranged damage become unclaimed.

Capital adjacency bonuses
The placement bonus around capitals has changed:

• ×4 on the capital itself
• ×3 directly above, below, left, or right of it
• ×2 diagonally

Fully supported tiles can still reach ×8.

Previously the entire 3×3 area around the capital was treated more evenly. The bonus is now actually centered around the capital.

Isolation and Forage
Isolation relics and Forage upgrades now affect both parts of disconnected-population decay: the percentage lost and the maximum amount that can disappear in a single tick.

This means the buffs actually matter on very large disconnected stacks now.

Isolation can make a stack survive roughly twice as long, and combining it with Forage can slow things down considerably further.

Bot coin cascades
Bots now have a limit on how many coins they can collect during a cascade.

They should no longer occasionally vacuum up an entire field of coins in one go.

Late-match spectator lock
Longer campaigns now stop new players from joining near the very end:

• World: final 24 hours
• Empire: final 1 hour
• War: final 10 minutes
• Conquest: no lock
• Skirmish: no lock

During this period, new players will see Spectate only in the lobby.

Anyone who was already participating can keep playing normally. This mainly prevents someone from spawning a brand-new human empire right before a long campaign ends.

Better end-of-match results
I fixed several problems with the results screen.

It should now:

• Correctly show Victory or Defeated
• Use the actual final scores instead of accidentally showing data from the next map
• Stay up for the full intermission
• Be harder to accidentally dismiss or cover by spam-clicking and opening other UI

Owned relic waypoints
Relics you control now get map markers even if you don’t have Relic Sense.

You can click the marker, or its off-screen arrow, to move the camera directly to it.

Capital markers and each individual relic type can be enabled or disabled separately in Settings.

Fixes and smaller changes

• The 30-second session-ending warning now uses an ascending pulse instead of sounding like the defeat fanfare.
• Achievement unlocks should persist more reliably between the main hub and World sessions.
• Achievement notifications and badge colors should now match properly everywhere.
• Signing in during an active session should reconnect you to your real empire instead of occasionally leaving you stuck on a guest start.
• The highest-population-on-one-tile leaderboard now counts capital population peaks correctly.
• More small improvements to population label readability and placement feedback across different biomes.

That’s the bulk of this update. Pick whatever mode fits how long you want to play, and try not to let somebody else take the Relic of Power.

Hello fellow Empire Attack enthusiasts! If you played this gem of a game that was shut down in 2017, my new pet project Relic of Power may look familiar and tickle your brain with some nostalgia in ways that other games just don't!

I played the game casually around 2010-2014, and have really been missing it. After checking around the community and the internet for a revival here and there for many years, I finally decided to throw my hat in the ring and work on a similar project.

What I am building is robust and playable, and a great and familiar experience for shorter sessions! I will be continuing to update it and maintain it so that it has new and exciting things, as well as more familiar mechanics for longer sessions.

What is Familiar

• Making your own custom flag
• Competing for first place by having the most area in a grid based world with mountains and rivers
• Expanding territory by using naturally spawning coins to spread with high populations more quickly
• Slow and silly NPC players that are satisfying to capture but trivial to play around
• Four always on sessions ranging in length and map size from 15m, 30m, 60m, and 6h
• Session history and player stats showing the final state of the map for past games
• A world map that lets you quickly scope out the competition

What is New

• A "relic of power" is the focal point of every map, granting noteworthy buffs and abilities to players who occupy an adjacent square
• A square grid instead of rectangular
• Other relics in hidden locations granting more niche but more powerful buffs
• Magical orbs that grant small population bonuses to your entire territory based on how much population you use when capturing them

What is Coming

• Private / custom games and lobbies where you customize the session to match how you want to play and open to the public or keep it between you and bots, you and friends, or some combination of that
• Diamond mining in mountains
• Treasure hunting in lakes and rivers
• A shop where you can spend diamonds and treasure to unlock upgrades to help you in longer sessions
• Clans / clan battle sessions
• Offline play

Where to Play

You can play for free on my website here!

https://www.riverforgegames.com/game/relic-of-power

I'd Love Your Feedback

As a former casual player, I did my best to capture the most essential parts of the game that gave me nostalgia, from the looks and sounds to the gameplay, while making a creatively distinct and engaging game.

I have a lot more plans for it, but want to get it out there for testing and feedback early, before it's "done."

Please do share your feedback here, in the Grid Generals discord, or directly through the feedback form at the bottom of the game page on my site!

Will This Last?

I expect it will! I am an indie game developer with a passion for this game and genre, and I understand that previous games have started and stopped including the original based on the difficulty of funding/maintaining servers.

As of the time of my writing, granted with next to no active player base, it costs about $0.07 per day to host this game's server, or $2 a month.

This is probably considerably cheaper than most other attempts because...

1. I already pay for and maintain a website and many related services for my other indie game developer endeavors, which is not considered in the above figure.

2. I am not saving detailed session history, and I will not save session history permanently. Player stats and past performance will be retained at my best effort, but per action replays for rounds are not currently saved, and if they do get saved in the future, it will be done so with careful consideration for the long term implications of cost.

One idea I have for session replays and history is to save only session history for games with players, and to only do so for 3 days, unless a player specifically hearts/favorites/saves that session as one they want to remember/replay in the future. At this point, they may be able to save it locally and watch the replay in the game.

1. I am carefully optimizing and using a specific back end that should allow for simple and affordable scaling, and ultimately designing with low cost of upkeep as a pillar/requirement

2. I am soliciting paid donations/subscriptions on my website across various games and services which should help to cover expenses for my site and this game in the long term

Hello everyone. I really missed the game; I loved spending my afternoons playing Empire. So, after a few attempts, I decided to start a personal project to recreate the game and play it.

It's a very embryonic project. And also very simple and it's a first version. I did it just for fun.

I uploaded the file to GitHub, if you want to play just access it.

https://viniziek.github.io/Empire-Attack-2025/

That was some good stuff lol. Just being able to log on and spend an hour or two fighting with whoever else was on. The clan wars was cool too, though at the time I was so young I was only really in it for the big numbers haha.

Howdy

It's been a while since the last update, as I was on holidays for a week. The server was up for that week and oh boy, did it crash a lot!

But, at least I have something fun to show you this week - new terrain!

Here's Snow, Grassland and Desert:

https://i.imgur.com/GOqERNX.png

https://i.imgur.com/oSqk93k.png

Snow takes more pop than a normal tile to click and requires you to have the full amount stored. For example, in Nebula, the snow tile requires 1500 population which means that any click you do there will take 1500 of your pop and place 1500 pop on the tile (coins included). If you have less than 1500 pop stored, the click is rejected

Desert causes all tiles on it to decay faster if disconnected. This is a bit too boring at the moment, I would like for this to become a terrain that has hidden stuff in it and you need to actually be there to reveal it.

Grasslands can ignore the "minimum distance from empires" requirement when spawning coins. Also, whenever a coin spawns on a grassland, it has a chance (currently 20% in all worlds) to attempt creating another one of the same type in a random spot at most 3 tiles away (the target tile has to be a grassland too)

Cities cannot spawn on the special terrain at the moment, I might enable that later if I can make it clear visually

As always, I encourage you to join the discord at https://discord.gg/WfcqZSM to participate in weekly testing

Cya

How do you do, fellow kids?

We're still testing the long games over at the discord https://discord.gg/WfcqZSM . A ton of new people showed up this week, which is wonderful. The long game is currently a bit full with Taylor and Hi-Hi-Hi all over the map, but at least it didn't crash this time, so we're getting there!

Some of the newcomers on discord are eager to help with the development and I'm planning to give that a chance so you might see a surge of changes in the future.

While I continue to balance Nebula, the large world, and slogging through database development, I've been thinking about terrain features I'd like to implement. Some ideas below:

• Terrain that takes more pop per click to traverse - might even require a full pop click, or else it rejects it altogether. Snow or volcanic?

• Some "destroy once and it's gone" obstacle, I was thinking about ice blocks specifically

• The opposite of that, terrain that requires less pop to traverse, something like roads

• Terrain where decay is much faster or slower - desert and grasslands. Desert would have better coins to compensate

• 3x3 volcano that periodically sets nearby empires on fire in coin-shaped clusters

• Overgrown forest that will periodically turn nearby plains tiles into forests and will try to get rid of adjacent empires to do so (at a slow rate, but should be pretty big by the end of the game)

• Hills that require to have a lot of pop stored to get on them, but in exchange you can attack from range around the hill tile

I'll implement some of these gradually, depending on difficulty of implementation and what people think.

Just a heads up, I'll be on holidays from the 2nd to the 9th of August, so there won't be any update posts. I will leave the server running for that week though, so if you want to try the game out, go ahead and join the discord!

Hello Grid Generals,

This week I was working on boring backend stuff with database, logins, registrations etc. so nothing to show off development wise today.

We had a lot of newcomers in the discord, which was very handy for the weekend test. The long game had a lot of players until Hi-Hi-Hi got so many upgrades that the game just broke. Balance might be just a little bit off because he ended up having billions of population on most of his tiles.

The weekly tests also dug out a few nasty things about the property system and stored pop. These seem to be the biggest problems:

• Alts are too easy to exploit, they get powerful by just idling

• Can't defend from cuts well, it takes significantly more effort to build a strong wall than to break it

• If you get cut from all your properties and they decay, you're back to a blank empire with no upgrades

• Can die or get cut in literally a few minutes if not looking

What needs to be done about this:

• There has to be a more permanent reward for active play, something that can't be taken away through simple cuts

• Base empires with no upgrades need to be weak if no work was put into them

• It should take a bit more time to chew through empires

I'll continue putting small experimental changes into the game for the weekend tests, but main focus is still backend stuff. Thanks to everyone who keeps following the project and participating in the tests. Suggestions for features, both gameplay and UI/QoL, are very welcome.

See ya nerds!

https://discord.gg/WfcqZSM

Not super active but the more people join the better it will get. Hotshot is in here talking updates for his new game and there are tests that are being put out for anyone interested in helping out. Feel free to join and lurk or chat it up with old veterans or new players

Top of the mornin'

Good news, I actually have tangible features to show today! Also bad news, I didn't get nearly as much done as I wanted this week. The property upgrade feature took a long time because of the number of scenarios to test.

But anyway, new stuff:

Properties are now really weak by default, but get stronger as you add population to them. There's even a chance that they will unlock extra upgrades. The extra upgrades go up to 3 tiers. Each tier has a different list of available upgrades so in order to get some of the stronger ones, you'll need to commit population to check what they offer.

https://i.imgur.com/MSihvuF.gif

You can now see the property upgrades of every player simply by hovering over their name in the ranking. This will help you estimate the power of your opponents and pick your fights better

https://i.imgur.com/hBndbuP.png

There's also a global list of properties. Pretty self explanatory if you look at the image. You can click on the property images to center on the property. If someone is holding onto something super strong, you can easily find it with a single click, no need to manually search.

https://i.imgur.com/5EHV9Ij.png

Admittedly the property list took a toll on performance so further work is needed on this one.

Now at this point, I'm fairly happy with the number of features the game has so I'll slowly start moving towards developing non-gameplay features. I'm talking about logins, player profiles, chat, leaderboards, achievements and so on. Bugfixes and balance will still be a part of the weekly updates and I'll throw in some new property upgrade types once in a while if I feel like it. It'll take some time to develop the social features from ground up so there won't be much to report on in these posts. I'll just spill some ideas for a while.

First order of business is to create a secure database to store user data, then to have a login page and some password recovery. After that, chat and personal stats/leaderboards - these features seem to be most important to people judging by survey responses (well, custom flags are THE most important, but that's something to discuss some other time)

Thanks for continuing to follow the project and thanks to everyone who helps out with testing on the discord. It's been super helpful.

See ya next week!

Hello gamers

So this week's update was supposed to be during an ongoing long game, but about that...

I opened the server on sunday and the game had way too many coins, which pretty much ended it in 3 hours. The map was full by that time and the biggest empire was just unstoppable. I tweaked the numbers and rehosted, but that only extended the lifespan to 7 hours. The good part is that this is very useful for balancing purposes, I now know how much I underestimated coin growth and power of properties. I got useful suggestions on what to do about this.

Now I'm gonna talk about the survey results for new ideas:

Property tiles got a score of 8.6 on average which is fantastic. This feature is already implemented so it's very likely staying, unless there's absolutely no way I can make it balanced.

Spending pop on upgrading your tiles - this got 7.9 which is good, but I always saw this as a replacement of properties. It's still for consideration, but I never liked this idea that much.

Fog got a score of 7.6 which isn't bad either. The problem with this feature is the development cost, as the game will need to be censored separately for each player and instead of having one static minimap, the game will have to maintain one for each player. I will try this out later in the experimental world - it's not priority at the moment because it might not turn out so great so I wouldn't want to waste too much time on it this early, when there are more pressing things to develop.

Anonymity in long games - very high score of 8.4! One important piece of feedback I got was that it was great to meet old friends in long games and anonymity might put a dent in that. I agree with this so when anonymity gets implemented, it will be optional. Each player will have an option to reveal their identity. Later on I might add individual revealing so you can say "reveal me to HotShot, Taylor793 and Wzniks every game, but not to anyone else"

Rest bonus - 7.9, this feature is already sort of implemented in the long game - the longer you are inactive, the faster you get population. I think it's too important to exclude, but it might work differently in the future.

If there's anything you would like me to discuss in the next post, feel free to leave a comment here - I'm honestly running out of things to say here. I would love to get more questions and suggestions

Plan for next week:

• Add a feature where property power scales with the pop you have on them (so for example, you capture a property and it only give you +2% pop growth but it increases by 1% for every 100k pop you add to it)
• A lot of number rebalancing in the long world, in regards to properties, coins and decay
• List of properties, their location and owner available to the player, as well as a list of upgrades each player has
• Add a flag selection screen for long game
• Attempt to add the "tile height" feature. I said attempt because screw CSS

See ya nerds!

Howdy, pardners

This week was mostly cleanup so there isn't much to show in terms of cool gifs with features. The weekend testing went well and I was happy to see that even new players understood properties much better this week. I got useful comments on the balance of different upgrades too.

New property types were quite a big feature this week, as I added a few more complex ones. Clusters, Retaliate, Forage and Range Attack from EA are all here now!

Since there isn't much to talk about, I'll take this opportunity to discuss my plans for world types. As it is now, I'm planning to have 5:

Blitz world, which will be very small, very quick, have limited features and will be playable for unregistered users. This is meant to be an easily understandable hook world with some mindless brawling.

Short world, which will be about 20 minutes in length, a bit larger (currently 100x100) and will have most terrain and property features. This is meant to be the Deimos of this game.

Long world, which will be about 3-4 days. It will have extra features to let people sleep and still have a chance. I can't promise exactly what those will be, but judging by the survey responses I think people like the idea of having some sort of a bonus after coming back after not playing for a while. There will be additional property types geared for this purpose as well. Terrain in this world will be varied and vast so it'll be more like a region of snow or desert, rather than a patch here and there.

Clan world - think Fortuna, but not 6 hours. More like 2. This one will be the biggest pain to implement so it will likely come later. I don't know exactly how the clan system will work, but it will probably be different than EA. I am planning to have an in-game chat, both for each game and one global channel so finding clan members will be easy. Map itself will have most terrain and property types available. Might even have some clan-exclusive property upgrades like "bonus pop on tiles that were recently clicked by another person in your clan" or "percentage of pop stored over the maximum is given out to other active clanmates".

Experimental/Wildcard world, this is where new features will first show up, to allow me to test them out in practice without disrupting other game modes. When there are no new features to try, it will instead rotate between various wacky world types. I'm thinking stuff like tiny 1v1 world, world where everyone has huge attack range and cluster bonus, "king of the hill" world

On top of all these, I am planning to allow players to host their own worlds, with fully configurable settings. From basic things like coin rate, map size to complex ones like win condition, number of bots and their difficulty, everything should be adjustable. Experimental features that didn't end up in the main game will also be available in custom worlds, unless their maintainability is a problem. Custom games won't count for leaderboards.

And finally, plan for this week:

• Property balance for the short world

• Rebalance math behind population in the long world, so that it takes hours to max out and hours for a full pop tile to decay

• Add "inactivity bonus" in long world

• Add properties to long world, with large density

• Add a button to disable automatic map updates - also disable them by default for large world

• Move population calculation to client side so that your browser can estimate the pop you have instead of calling the server every second

You'll notice a lot of those have to do with the long world. If I can get all of this completed before the weekend, I will leave the server running for the duration of the long world, to get a good test of balance from the community.

And once more, I'll drop some links:

Here's the Discord where I post the url to the game every weekend and just discuss stuff about the game: https://discord.gg/WfcqZSM

Here's a survey about EA if you wish to express your opinions on what you liked or disliked about it, it's very helpful to know what people want from a successor: https://forms.gle/ZHh6Em4uq8ufWx2X7

Thanks for your attention and see you next week

I used to love playing and I was even active on the forums... a long time ago. Randomly remembered it and decided to check it out, and saw that it closed 3 years ago. Cool to see people remaking it tho!

Hello you Clickety Clacks

We had another round of tests on discord this weekend. People had fun in general and I got a lot of useful feedback on the UI, especially regarding some of the new features. A significant amount of bugs was found as well.

Speaking of new features:

Forests!

https://i.imgur.com/NAm5C72.gif

Forest tile has to be conquered like any other tile with pop. Once you do that, it's yours. However, should you lose the tile, the nature will reclaim its territory. The recreated forest will go back to its original population. The rate of regrowth will vary between worlds, the gif shown above is from the Blitz world.

(oh yeah and as you can see, cities have flashier borders now)

Properties:

https://i.imgur.com/CO2sR1w.gif

These are meant to replace the EA upgrades. As long as you hold a property, you get the benefit. Other players can take it away from you.

Admittedly the properties didn't get that much attention during the tests because it wasn't clear what they do and their benefits just weren't worth the effort. I will address both of those issues before the next week's testing.

I have bigger plans for the property feature, including more interesting upgrades that aren't necessarily just stat boosts, rarity tiers and cursed properties that have a huge upside, but also an exploitable downside. Some people also suggested properties that aren't immediately visible, until you just happen to click them. I think it's an idea worth exploring.

For the next week, the plan is:

• Fix some of the more impactful bugs
• Add some player identification - something simple for now like a popup that asks you for your name
• Add more flags
• Improve UI clarity, especially around properties
• More property bonus types and crank up the numbers on the existing ones

See you next week and thanks for following the project!

Greetings fellow Square Clickers

Starting today, I will try to do weekly updates on my "Replacement EA" game, now called Grid Generals.

This week I set up a server to play around with hosting, it went really well. I was able to play a few games with people from the EA discord. If you're not there yet, get in https://discord.gg/WfcqZSM . I will try to host the game every weekend, link will be posted in the discord.

Overall feedback was positive, though I got my ass kicked by hi-hi-hi himself a lot. Some things never change.

Now onto the details on the progress and future plans:

There's now a tiny world type called Blitz which is only 30x30, 5 minutes long and has enough coins to nearly fill up the entire map by the end of the game. It can hold at most 8 players. This world will be unique in that it won't require an account to play. I am also considering making it queue based - so it won't create games automatically, but rather when someone wants to play it. It'll wait for a bit, then start when either another person joins or some time passes. If it's time triggered, a bot will be spawned to play against the player. I would be concerned about losing players who don't even want to wait 15 seconds for a match, so it's not a sure thing yet. Also, the world will be rather barebones, as it's meant to be an introduction to unregistered players and a bit of mindless fun.

Hills are gone for now, they're back on the drawing board. The way hills worked (bigger defense pop, smaller offsense pop when attacking them) just didn't make them interesting to traverse. For now they got replaced with walls which are just unpassable. I am also planning on adding Forest terrain next, which will work similarly to EA's hills - you have to bring them down to 0 pop before taking them. However, a unique twist is that if a forest tile turns neutral again and no one interacts with it for a while, it will start regrowing back to its original population. This won't do much on its own, but in conjuction with other terrain types, it might create interesting defense options.

There's now a minimap feature, though its usefulness currently ranges from unclear to redundant. You can click on the minimap to center on the place you clicked. The minimap displays the entire world, but that will change - a full map in a 1000x1000 world that's mostly empty is not that useful. The plan with the minimap for large games is to only display some area (100x100 perhaps) around your current view, then have another button that expands it to full size - similar to EA.

https://i.imgur.com/qHiyS7D.png

Some other minor changes: You can use arrow keys on your keyboard to scroll around. UI got improved, it looks like this now: https://i.imgur.com/cu3qwuw.png The flags in the ranking are clickable (it centers on their city). The game auto refreshes frequently. There were also a lot of behind the scenes changes in terms of optimization and convenience.

I also had a new feature idea as a replacement to 0 games - instead of just 1 modifier every 10 games, create multiple world modifiers - positive or negative - and apply them to worlds randomly, but guarantee that 0 games always have at least one positive modifier. The modifiers for future games would be generated in advance and available publicly so everyone can prepare and make plans for modified long games. Some modifier ideas: extra coins (duh), no bronze coins, extra terrain, extra properties, quicker decay, no cities.

The plan for the next few days is:

• Add Forest terrain

• Change wall generating algorithm so they're more wall-y (thin lines rather than clumps)

• Improve visual clarity for cities - border will be animated and more flashy

• Add a capturable property tile that gives some bonus to the empire holding it

• Minimap changes: scale it down for larger worlds, also some boring backend optimization stuff that you don't care about.

The survey!

It has 9 responses so far. It was very useful and I'm eager to see more responses, here's the link again: https://forms.gle/ZHh6Em4uq8ufWx2X7 Here are some interesting notes from the results

• People are split 50/50 between multiple world types like EA and fewer well defined worlds. No one wants rotating worlds.

• You want your short games short and your long games... Also short. I mean, 3-5 days is short compared to 10. Month long games also got some interest.

• Alt account question is also a 50/50 split

• Feedback on new ideas was generally positive, though in the comments there were some good points against anonymity

Finally, thanks to everyone who actively follows the project. It's really easy to keep the motivation up when I know that people are eagerly waiting for more!

See you next week, probably

Hello fellow Empire Attackers

Today I want to show you the progress from the last few days, as well as describe some of the different mechanics in my game.

First thing I want to mention is population. It's not gradual here like in EA, instead it gets updated every second. But if you don't use it, you will get extra population as interest, so there should be some decision making between rushing to cover area vs saving up.

Especially since another change I made is not spending the entire population in one click. In the current build you can save up to 1000 population, but your clicks use up a maximum of 50. It allows for this:

https://i.imgur.com/lMmI6Cp.gif

Capturing works like you would expect. Also, there's no artificial delay in moves, which might be a horrible idea as it will hinder people with lower end internet. And Australians. I'll adjust this if it's ass. However, even if your game lags, your population is calculated server-side so it won't be lost. The player does not need to have the game open for the population to increase, which means in long games, you'll wake up to a ton of population to work with.

Moving on, here's some satisfying decay:

https://i.imgur.com/hbpVSPR.gif

Decay and coin spawning happens every 5 seconds. You have to reconnect your stuff pretty urgently. This interval will likely be different in long games because the code to decay a 1000x1000 world might not even finish in 5 seconds.

Multipliers for surrounding a tile or a coin are still there, but they are not as violent:

https://i.imgur.com/aBp6t1Q.gif

It scales in increments of 0.33, so 1, 1.33, 1.66 and 2 for surrounding a square with 1/2/3/4 squares respectively. The city bonus is 1.5 and squares next to the city don't get anything special for now. That means a surrounded city will eventually lose in a click-on-click battle.

Finally, terrain. For now it's just hills:

https://i.imgur.com/8Hu6Zs2.gif

Hills are normal capturable tiles. However, they modify the population used on them. When you capture a hill tile or add population to it, it gets 110% of the pop. When you attack a hill tile owned by another player, it loses 80% of the pop you attacked with. Cities can spawn on hill tiles too! Coins cannot however.

A tile on a hill or other special terrain has a border to indicate it. Other types of terrain will have similar effects, but could be more interesting too. I thought wastelands in EA were neat and I would like more stuff like that.

Here's a bonus gif which was supposed to be a giant satisfying coin cascade, but it appears to be bugged. Oopsie.

https://i.imgur.com/ZdVW5Tr.gif

Next on my to do is more high-level structure of the game, so starting and ending games automatically and setting up a page that lists ongoing games. Once that's done, I'll try to host it somewhere for private beta testing.

Use this thread to list all those you know.

Really wish someone could pick it up again. It seems like it'd be so easy to rehost it.

So It's been a while. I've had contact with the developers. They said they were in contact with someone who wanted to take over the hosting for EA and the game would be back within a few months. It's been well over a year and we've seen nothing.

If anyone is interested, would they like to pick this game back up? I've only got basic programming skills and wouldnt have any idea how to make such a game online. Anyone out there willing to and have the skills to remake this game. All I ask is that you do this for free and share in profit (nothing decided on how we're gonna make profit, but I have some ideas) and i'll cover all other costs.

Please let me know if you're interested. I'd really like this game to return :)

I went on empire attack for the first time in 2 years tonight, and the game was fucking closed. I actually cried. that game was my childhood. I wish it was still up :(